A violent page-turner with compelling imagery that will leave readers breathless.
In Icelandic author Simonar’s thriller, set largely in the Washington, D.C., area, a renowned doctor encounters international conspiracies, political intrigue, ruthless murders, and billion-dollar deals.
At 32 years of age, Dr. Caroline Glyn is already a world authority on malignant cells, and her research may be getting closer to identifying a cure for cancer. But her personal life is unraveling; she’s a widow and single mother after her doctor husband died of a brain tumor, and now she’s faced with mounting debt and the very real chance that her research funding will end soon. While dropping off her 5-year-old daughter, Mary, at a prestigious school in Georgetown, she meets the father of Mary’s friend: an elderly Russian man who goes by the name Rykov and says that he works for a multinational trading company. He and Glyn unexpectedly bond, due to their shared feelings of loss; his wife also died from cancer. When Glyn returns to pick up Mary later that afternoon, however, the mother and daughter witness the brutal killing of Rykov and his child in an apparent hit—but before the old man dies, he grabs Glyn’s hand and inexplicably transfers his essence into her consciousness. Soon, Glyn, through conversations with FBI Special Agent Carl Smith, discovers that Rykov was the head of the original Russian Mafia and was one of the most powerful, ruthless criminal masterminds in the world. Various groups maneuver to silence Glyn—she was the only one who saw Rykov’s killers, and, as a result, Mary is abducted. With her daughter missing—and her sanity seemingly fragmenting as an infamous criminal’s thoughts and memories blend with her own—Glyn sets out on a quest for vengeance.
Over the course of this novel, Simonar presents a thriller tale that’s absolutely relentless in its pacing. Indeed, he makes sure that the action is virtually nonstop from the first page to the last, while also establishing a dark crime fiction tone that can be decidedly brutal at times. However, it’s the clarity and purity of the writing, which is courageously uninhibited in style and complemented by forceful imagery, that makes this novel so compulsively readable throughout. For example, here’s a representative passage, after Rykov is killed in front of Glyn: “She drifted, eerily watching the blood seep out of the old man. It collected in a puddle that slowly circled the crushed cherry blossoms the girls had dropped on the asphalt. In curious detachment, Caroline marveled at how beautifully the two colors mingled, dark heavy red against the fleeting pink of a Washington spring.” Readers may have two minor criticisms with the work, however. First, there is the fact that the story never adequately explains how Rykov’s essence was transferred to Glyn, which some may find bothersome; and second, there are some occasional distracting errors in grammar over the course of the book. However, these elements are not likely to hinder readers’ overall enjoyment of this Beltway thriller.
A violent page-turner with compelling imagery that will leave readers breathless.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-9197966788
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Eventhor Media
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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